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This past July we started to gear up for the installation of the 56th iteration of the Carnegie International exhibition. This exhibition, which reoccurs every four years, is Carnegie Museum of Artís largest and most visible project, making it a very exciting and complex venture and a very challenging installation for a museum of our modest size.

One of the goals of our newly formed Art Preparation and Installation (API) department was to evaluate the way we manage our projects and tasks to become more efficient and to improve how our team members communicate with one another and with other departments. Outlined below are a few tools we have implemented to help us:
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The movement of artwork at the Saint Louis Art Museum requires authorization from the Registrar through a Location Change Request. The requests are generated from the Museumís Collection Management System, TMS (The Museum System) and attached to the Installation Calendar.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) asset tracking has made its way into art handling. Fine Art Shipping began working with it in early 2009, and we are in a fine-tuning stage with the system. RFID shares barcodingís facilitation of electronic databases in inventory maintenance, but takes the concept a step further. The idea is to improve the accuracy and efficiency of our storage maintenance operations by eliminating several points of potential human error and object handling. And apart from the nearly completed updating of our existing storage with RFID, it has already provided savings on some jobs by streamlining every stage in tracking our custody of objects - up to and including billing.
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SketchUp can be a pretty helpful tool to have in a project manager's bag of tricks. It's the simplest 3D graphics program that I've seen for its versatility, and worth a try for anyone who likes to think visually from time to time.

The basic program is a free download, and the 'Pro' version is about $400 and change. The added functionality of the full version is a little esoteric in the context of how I use it. Among other things, it allows the user to import/export files with CAD and other 3D applications.

Completed in June of 2004 and spanning a 5 year period, over 800,000 objects were documented, packed and relocated at the National Museum of American Indian. This collection is now one of the most thoroughly documented collections of its type and size due to the digital imaging component integrated into the move process. It is also one of the more accessible collections due to the addition of a barcoding system that was also integrated into the move project.
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This information comes our way from Chris Barber at Fine Art Shipping. Read it to find out more about dealing in a very systematic way with an age-old issue. This article offers step by step instruction in how to use basic information technology to create a tool to increase your efficiency and effectiveness in managing projects.
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